Community Melodies - Providing young people in Birmingham with community music opportunities

Community Melodies began in October 2015, with a selection of Year 9 and 10 students from three secondary schools in Birmingham. The project aims to educate and empower the students through learning about community music, as well as provide them with opportunities to build skills that can be directly applied in their future working lives. All of the schools have had regular training sessions from passionate community musicians, each with experience in working in healthcare settings, who work with the young people to develop their leadership, presentation and team-working skills. The project concludes with each school visiting the Paediatric Unit of Heartlands Hospital, where the students will lead their own interactive music workshop for the patients.

This project was set up by the Arts Department of the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust, with the financial assistance of Youth Music and the Eric W Vincent Trust. Community Melodies takes place in the East of Birmingham, a large and impoverished area. The schools involved are Waverley School, Bordesley Green Girls’ School and Hodge Hill College. Community Melodies sessions are run by three groups of facilitators from M&Em Music, Bridge Arts, and MF Community Music CIC.

Find out more at: www.artsandmusic.org, or follow the Arts Department of HEFT on Twitter (@heftartsdept)

Who, what, where?

The Community Melodies team is made up of our dedicated project co-ordinator, Stuart Tollach, and three separate community music organisations: Bridge Arts, M&Em Music and MF Community Music CIC. The project is part-managed by MF Community Music CIC, who started the project through their role as music co-ordinators for the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust. They left the Trust in December 2015, and since then have managed the project remotely whilst maintaining a strong relationship with the Arts Department at HEFT. We have 3 pairs therefore of music facilitators, each of whom have a history of working in healthcare settings. 

Community Melodies takes place in the East side of Birmingham, with Waverley School, Bordesley Green Girls' School and Hodge Hill College. It can be a real challenge for young people to find work opportunities, and therefore to build up their empolyablility skills, and so this project seeks not only to inspire the next generation of community musicians, but to give the participants real tangible skills that they can use in their working lives.

 

What stage is the project at?

We are at a very interesting point of Community Melodies, as all three schools are at very different stages! This is due to a number of school timetabling issues, but it has been a real learning curve for when we consider the future of this project. Waverley School had a fantastic final workshop with children at Heartlands Hospital recently, with overwhelming positive feedback from the facilitators, staff and patients. You can read more on their journey at the end of this post, from the facilitators of Bridge Arts. Bordesley Green Girls School’s students are in the final stage of their preparation, and will be leading their final workshop at the end of this Spring term, working alongside the facilitators of MF Community Music CIC. Hodge Hill College unfortunately had to miss out on workshops this term, but will be continuing the project after Easter. 

With two schools drawing to the end of their time on the project, it has been clear that each student has progressed on different levels throughout the process. For some, it has been learning how to be more empathetic, while for others it has involved building their confidence in order to step outside of comfort zones. Des Wilson, the music teacher at Bordesley Green Girls' School, recently commented on how much of a change he has seen in all areas of their work. Our final report and evaluation will be able to communicate more clearly all of the benefits, and challenges, that the project has presented.

 

What have been the challenges so far?

There is always a difficulty with timetabling sessions, particularly when there are so many places and organisations involved. There have been a number of unexpected school events that have come up, and this has been a learning curve. For any future development of this project, we would hope to be able to set up the entire year's sessions further in advance, as working termly has proved difficult for some schools due to timetable changes etc. As with any project, the key for us to work around this has been a little bit of patience plus establishing and maintaining good communication with the organisations involved - as soon as the communication slips it does become very difficult to keep the momentum with sessions going. 

In addition to school timetabling, organisation of hospital workshops always come with potential challenges. It is an unpredictable environment, and so one challenge has been ensuring that the team and the students themselves are fully prepared to work in a flexible way. This has been tricky for some students, but by visiting the hospital ward for observation sessions (led by their facilitators) they have built a greater understanding and appreciation for the environment. 

Another challenge was ensuring that the entire team was up-to-date with each individual school's progress. A particularly useful tool for the team was an online site called Padlet. It basically works like an online board, where you can pin in notes and files. This was a fantastic resource for us, as in the first term of the project the schools were getting sessions from all three organisations, and this was an easy way for us to update one another without sending a mass of emails! It can be as secure as you require it to be (there are options for an administrator to authorise any new posts if need be) and we were able to hear recordings of the sessions as well as see photos in an easy way. It is also completely free to use, and I would strongly recommend it to any project that has a strong element of independent work.

A word of advice - you need to have a few administrators to ensure that the posts are organised/deleted on a regular basis, as with the progress of Community Melodies, the Padlet page got pretty busy!

 

What impact has the project had so far?

So far, there has been a very positive response from all three schools and their assigned facilitators. I think the best way to give a genuine insight is through the facilitators who have seen the individual and team growth. The extract below is from the fantastic Ann and Daz of Bridge Arts, who worked with the students at Waverley School.

The children we worked with at Waverley school were focussed in activities, and excited about the project right from the start. They worked well together, supporting each other, and helping to develop one another's ideas.

The biggest challenge we had was to bring the children away from playing set pieces of music, and to encourage more improvisation. This was a real step outside their comfort zone, and took about three sessions to achieve. One of the most successful strategies we employed was to take away the school instruments that they usually played on, and replace these with a variety of tuned and untuned percussion instruments. We also stressed the importance of listening to patients playing, and fitting in with them.

The final session with the students at the hospital showed how far they had come. They demonstrated empathy, great communication skills and flexibility in the running of their workshops. They adapted their plans to suit the needs of the group they met with, and were really proud of their achievements.

Our experience of Padlet has been that it is a very useful tool in shared communications. The main advantage of Padlet is that we were able to compare and contrast the provision of similar activities in differing settings. It enabled us to pick up from each other’s workshops easily when we changed leadership in settings. Being able to access all the information in one place helped to make everybody feel more of a team, although we were working separately.

 

What next?

With the impending conclusion of the project, we are working with the facilitators to ensure that we finish the project in the best way for the students - it is important that they do not simply do their hospital workshops and never see their facilitators again! We are working alongside the schools to organise de-brief sessions, in which the students will be presented with a certificate from their facilitators. This will include a paragraph, written by their music leaders, expressing the skills each student have learnt, and it is hoped that this can be used in conjunction with their CVs and future employment. It is important to remember that the areas these students live in do not have a wealth of employment opportunities, and so it is hoped that this can be a tangible tool for the students.

 

Clare Murphy & Georgina Farrow (Project Co-ordinators)